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Using Social Networks for Business – Where Are You?

Where are the people I’m trying to reach?

This is also an important question because there are a limited number of hours in the day and we need to put our efforts into what makes sense for our business.  Just because you heard about MySpace in the news doesn’t mean that your audience of roofing contractors is there or has even heard about it.  You’ll need to do a little research to find out where your audience is.

Here are some places to look:

  • Start with publications focused at your audience – their websites often offer or link to a existing community.
  • Look to see if there are dedicated groups on existing social networks (like Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, etc).
  • Use Google to search for your industry name to see if any other websites have or link to a network.
  • Try a blog search to find blogs (try Google Blog Search or Technorati) in your industry – they often have communities or link to them.
  • Ask professionals in your industry if they know of any online communities.

If you still come up blank it may be that there isn’t a community for your industry (yet).  Before you run off to start your own community, it is also important to understand your audience.  Are they even online?  Do they just read websites or will they create content and join the conversation?  The Profile tool at the Groundswell site can help you understand the tendencies of your audience.

Other posts in this series:

What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business?

Using Social Networks for Business – What Are Your Goals?

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Google Shares Their Ranking Philosophy

Google shares their ranking philosophy, which is used in many of their products, including News, Images, YouTube, Maps, and, of course, Search.  Their philosophy breaks down to:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

– Official Google Blog: Introduction to Google Ranking

What does this mean for your business website?

Best locally relevant results – if you have a small local business you are still very much in the running for search results to people within your area.  Your company does not need expensive nationwide advertising or reach to still be relevant in Google’s eyes.

Google may change their algorithm which may change the ranking of your website in their search results.  However, they are not manually removing you from searches unless you violate their terms of service.  Most importantly, keep it simple, implies that having good content that is of value to your customers will get you further than just relying on SEO tricks.

I still believe content is king. If you have information that your customers want (remember to listen to them), they will come.

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Adobe Working with Search Engines to Make Flash Content Less Invisible

You may have heard that websites built in Flash or as Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are invisible to search engines and are not a great idea for search engine optimization (SEO). This is not entirely true as sites which are built properly may enable search engines to reach a great deal of their content. However, this usually requires that the developer really knows what they are doing and may require special coding just for the search engines – even that is not a guarantee that search engines can reach everything (or anything depending on the content).

Today, Adobe (the makers of Flash and many other RIA products) announced that they are working with search engines to make the content in Flash and RIAs more visible to searches (or indexing). Yippie! Let’s code all our websites in beautiful Flash, right?

Well, hold on. The problem is much more complex than just working to get the content searchable (which in itself is quite complex). As Hank Williams discusses, the way RIAs are created inherently makes the information in them very difficult to display to a search engine. He uses the example of Microsoft Word where the type of information that is available to search engines is the menus and what is in the menus, which is not particularly useful. Much of the information that is available in RIAs requires a person to make some type of interaction (choosing to see all the red shoes for example), which then displays a specific set of information – very difficult to reproduce for a search engine and even more difficult to make meaningful to a search.

This is certainly the first step in having information in RIAs available to search engines, but there is much work yet to be done. Flash and RIAs can be used to provide great customer experiences, just don’t bet on them to provide search engine traffic to your website (yet).

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